


(fall like a) guillotine

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-31
Updated: 2015-01-31
Packaged: 2018-03-09 21:29:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3264962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the dust has settled, that new ash from that new fire, Rachel lines her weaknesses up like surgical tools on a table and looks at them unblinking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(fall like a) guillotine

**Author's Note:**

> [warnings: consent issues typical with Rachel Duncan, reference to canon death/suicide, violence (and reference to canon violence)]

When the dust has settled, that new ash from that new fire, Rachel lines her weaknesses up like surgical tools on a table and looks at them unblinking. She wishes, in fact, that they were more like surgical tools: sharp, near-identical, useful for a specific purpose. They are instead Kira’s drawing, possibly still lying where Rachel had left it – above Kira’s blood on the ground, adjacent to Rachel’s blood – because, like the drawing, they are stupid and sentimental and have Rachel’s loss woven into them in a way she is not able to see.

Flaws. Faults. Weaknesses. The word in the Greek could be _asthenia_ ; it could again be _hamartia_.

It depends on how much you are willing to let these things cripple you.

The first weakness is Ethan Duncan, and Ethan is dead; you’d think that this would solve Rachel’s problems, but in fact it has agitated them. Ethan Duncan dying always makes her love him more. The brain is stupid: it wants to forgive, it softens faults and nudges the horrible things in a human being until you are forced to accept and love them. Sometimes Rachel hates her own brain, hates the rush – like an _addict_ – she gets when watching a tape revives some dull spark of feeling, the way it sets off a cacophony of thrills in her stomach and in the warm dark spaces of her brain. It sickens her. She contemplates self-hatred.

Hating her own brain is a waste of time. She will not turn her anger in on herself, unless it is an improvement.

She can’t quite bring herself to turn her anger on her – on – on Professor Duncan, although she’s tried. The cold sharp knife-blade rush of ordering her own father imprisoned was lost under the joy of seeing him in her viewing room, in her chair, like he had always been there.

(Her hands did not shake on the tea tray; they considered it, and this is weakness enough.)

The weakness of Ethan Duncan is that she was not anticipating it – think the words _blind spot_ , in the mocking sing-song that Sarah Manning’s voice takes up when processed through the echo-chamber of Rachel’s memories. The weakness of Sarah Manning is that she is tangled up in everything – she is _here_ , after all, when Rachel is thinking of her father, laughing like someone who has a family, laughing like someone who has something to lose and has not yet lost it. Not laughing like Rachel at all.

Fine, then. Ethan Duncan was Rachel’s _blind spot_. She has cried very little in the last twenty years, prided herself on being desert country – those fire-hot days, those nights so cold that the stupider creatures perish. The water stays underground, where it belongs. But she saw her father hunched over at Siobhan Sadler's table, looking sad and worn, and – well, for a second she felt all-consumingly and monstrously _guilty_. With a child’s logic she could not stop the thought that her remembering him happy and laughing had sucked all that laughter from him.

After that she should have been angry, probably, but she miscalculated and wept instead. All that rain, on the parched dirt of a desert, where once there could have been wildflowers.

She moved on. She covered up the tears with a false smile, and told her father that he was nothing of the sort, not in the ways that mattered. She swallowed every tick and twitch and way her body would try and betray her, give away the growth of things like _love_ and _regret_.

But when Rachel put on her makeup the morning after Ethan Duncan made an abrupt reappearance in her life, her hands shook.

Her hands _shook_.

Thankfully there was no one to see, because Daniel was dead.

(A brief footnote on Daniel: Daniel was never a weakness. Daniel was the DYAD condensed into a man-shell and given to Rachel like a gift, like a contract masquerading as a gift. Like a leash. Like a lot of things, really; one found oneself throwing metaphors at Daniel haphazardly, trying frantically to get one to stick. He was the sort of person who would be anything, but never took to any of it with any particular passion.

Rachel practiced on him what she would do to contracts, business partners, anyone who got in her way. She is certain the reports filed on her would interpret her savage ownership of Daniel as a weakness. It is easy to look at the bite marks on someone’s skin and say that they are the result of hunger.

Maybe she was desperate for some solid mark of control. Then again, bite marks fade. A signed contract is in theory _forever_.)

(Daniel’s death was not a weakness either. It would be easier for other people if it was, and Rachel refused to make it easier for other people. Paul looked at her with pity from the ground next to Daniel’s corpse, because a woman weeping over a man’s fallen body is easy to understand. Men have a tendency to want to put women in boxes; at the center of those boxes, themselves.

Instead Rachel stared at Daniel’s body and thought: _Sarah_.

So there is that.)

Rachel has never pretended she is not watched. That’s a foolish assumption for _anyone_ to make, especially the woman who frequently rereads the results of her medical tests even if she is not _entirely_ certain as to their meaning. Especially the woman referred to as “subject” from this point forward.

But even an excellent camera could not have detected the tremors in her hands. Rachel Duncan has never been a machine, despite rumors, despite some spirited attempts; in this instance she was superior to a machine. _She_ could see the way her hands shook.

In her chest, the desert-dirt of her heart cracked open and began to grow green. This was weakness.

At the time she didn’t realize. Instead she watched her hands tremor, felt distantly the smooth round beginnings of sobs at the bottom of her throat. Swallowed once, twice; clenched her hands into fists and relaxed them. If she was the sort of person to talk to herself she might murmur something comforting, or some strict reminder – Rachel Duncan takes many liberties with herself (her self), but speech has never been one of them. She smiles with closed lips.

She did not say a word. The tremors stopped. She pretended that was the end of it.

It was not the end of it.

The metaphor now is a floodgate; then again, perhaps the metaphor is the dike, leaking seawater no matter how many small holes you plug. Do not call this man your father. Do not let him stay in the fresh air – like water, he is safer underground. Holes and holes and holes, until the wall is gone.

The wall crumbles, slowly, worn down by water – a _useless_ mechanism, crying, dull to instill in others and even duller to experience. Yet she cannot stop herself. When Ethan Duncan dies she hurls herself at him over and over again, crying like a child and howling like an animal.

(The first rule is do not be a child. The second rule is do not be an animal.

The first thing you do is bury your loved ones – not your dead, necessarily, although at the time Rachel did not realize there was a difference. She assumed that her dead and her loved were the same, a Venn diagram like a hole in your chest.

She was younger, then. Her dress itched, real velvet and no less uncomfortable for it. Aldous Leekie stood over her at her funeral; in Rachel’s unreliable memory, he looks precisely like she’d always imagined Death. So there was some comfort in it, the way he looked at the grave with ownership.

Later she would realize what that ownership was – much later, while reassembling herself into an artful collection of angles, calculated casualness against Aldous Leekie’s desk. Later she would realize that Aldous Leekie’s ownership of her parents’ grave was only because he had put them there.

But she didn’t realize it at the time. Her eyes were blurred by tears and the remaining dirt from the handful she’d thrown into her parents’ grave lingered under her fingernails.

To say that she considered painting them right then, at that instant, would make a better story; it would be easier for other people, wouldn’t it?)

When Martin came in to pick up the pieces of the teacup, Rachel’s father, Rachel, she stared at her shaking hands and willed herself to reassemble, as if walls can be rebuilt once they have fallen. As if teacups, broken into shards of porcelain on the ground, can ever be taught to hold water again.

Martin murmured condolences, as they took her father’s corpse away. Rachel, kneeling on the ground, hated them. She hated Martin, an easy and vicious reflex. She hated herself. She hated Sarah Manning.

Out of all of these, only the latter was acceptable – but Sarah is still not Ethan, is still not that weakness in Rachel.

She reached for the parts of herself that she knew could support her and found them gone. In her chest, where there was supposed to be glass and steel, there was only a garden. Ethan Duncan grew insidious in her, tucking himself between her ribs, giggles from videotapes slithering through her ears and into her bloodstream. Weak, weak, weak.

Rachel loved him.

(Weak.)

Rachel _missed_ him.

(Weak.)

Lying in her bed at night, she allowed herself for the first time in years to contemplate the reality of him.

( _Weak_.)

She tried desperately to not let these thoughts affect her, _our relationship must remain…professional_ , but Ethan Duncan tore at the foundation of her with hungry, overgrown fingernails until her found the dirt underneath. Until he found the grave.

(The first thing you do is bury your loved ones, but what if they come _back?_ )

 _You_ are barren by design.

(Weak.)

 _You_ don’t deserve me anymore.

(Weak.)

 _My_ dear, dear Rachel. _My_ poor, poor Rachel.

( _Weak_.)

(If she is his, than she is weak.)

And now Ethan is dead, and the person who was Rachel Duncan has crumbled like the footage of a city on fast-forward: decaying. The weakness of Ethan Duncan is that Rachel Duncan was not anticipating this, any of this, and now the foundation she has spent years and careful years building is gone. Ethan Duncan resurrected himself and resurrected Rachel Duncan with him – not Rachel _Duncan_ , she who spits out her last name like she wants to be rid of it, she who screams it like a reminder to the whole world of who and what she is. Not that Rachel Duncan. The one who sat on Ethan’s lap and was content with it, who said the word _Daddy_ like loving was not a terrible thing. The weakness of Ethan Duncan is that Rachel is forced to confront that girl-child, who sidles into Rachel’s shadow and peeks at her slyly from the back of the mirror. (The first rule is do not be a child.) She contemplates _shame_ , and isn’t that weakness? Doubting and hating and regretting – why let other people nibble away at yourself when you can do it, tearing yourself open with your father’s shaking hands? Your father’s hands your hands, shaking and shaking?

Professor Duncan came back, and Rachel could not separate him from _Daddy_ even though she shoved _Father_ in front of the word. So it was her daddy who told her that she didn’t deserve him – as if in his last seconds he understood her, and understood how much she would have liked to hurt him.

(His death is unacceptable for many reasons, but one of them is that he did it to himself.)

_You don’t deserve me anymore._

_You don’t deserve me either_ , Rachel would have liked to say, because Rachel Duncan built herself out of the ashes of a lab fire and Ethan Duncan did nothing but turn his back on her for twenty years.  But she did not get the chance to tell him, because he was dead and Rachel was alone. Completely alone.

It’s Sarah’s fault, of course. Everything is.

The second weakness is Sarah Manning, and the weakness of Sarah Manning is precisely that everything is her fault. Ethan Duncan ripped Rachel open and Sarah Manning sidled in, neatly, to fill the space.

Although this is not entirely chronologically accurate. Sarah Manning came first, dragged Rachel’s father after her like the tail of some animal. Some beast. It is childish to say that Sarah Manning ruined _everything_ …and yet. And _yet_.

To view a different situation through the same lens: the morning after Sarah Manning made her feral-cat way into the DYAD and lashed out at Rachel (like a child) (like an animal), Rachel stood in front of the mirror and put her face on, careful strokes of concealer and lipstick and mascara until her face was her own and not any of the others’.

(In another room, nowhere near Rachel Duncan – in more ways that one – Alison Hendrix would apply her own makeup, and shape her own face from it. One might be tempted to say that the two of them are the same. That flutter of eyelashes, that smooth face, those berry-bright lips.

Rachel has never even considered the idea.

Of course, this may or may not be a lie.

Assume that it isn’t, this one time. Assume that Rachel Duncan saw photos of Alison Hendrix asleep, angry red lines on her face from her sleep mask, a line of drool crusted down her chin. Facebook photos and surveillance footage, so far away from a human being it is laughable. Helena understood the others as passports and charcoal scribbles on a wall; Rachel understood them as the spikes and dips of charts, as monitor assignments, as more problems to be solved.

Sarah didn’t understand them as “the others” at all; therein lies the difference.)

Before she did that, though, she waited until Daniel’s footsteps receded to one of the blind spots in her apartment. She leaned in close to the mirror, feeling the counter dig into the space under her ribs, and she brushed her fingers against the brilliant firework bruise on her face. Harder. Harder. Harder, until she was pushing at it, feeling pain like a revelation. Watching the unpainted curve of her mouth droop open, a naked vulnerable shape. Prodding and poking and running her fingers over it until she knew every jagged edge of that pain.

When Rachel heard the polite sounds of Daniel’s footsteps in the living room, she leaned back from the mirror and let out a long, shuddering breath. Slowly, she reached up and trailed her fingertips along the bruise, light as she could, and watched herself in the mirror. _Her_ fingers. _Her_ face.

 _How dare she_ , breathed a voice in the back of Rachel’s head, and Rachel prodded at that like she had prodded at her face and found at the tail-end of it anger. Found at the tail-end of that the thought _Sarah_.

So there is that.

Sometimes Rachel thinks about the fact that Sarah has never been hurt by Rachel – not in the same way. Sarah has never had to paint a lie over her skin to hide the fact that she has lost to Rachel. Sarah has never _lost_ to Rachel, is the problem. As far as Rachel knows Sarah has no reminder that Rachel has been in her life at all.

(Except: when Rachel made a circle of her apartment, marveling at the lack of Daniel’s footsteps, she saw a smear of brown-red on the wall of her shower. Wet her finger. Smeared that finger against the wall and stuck it in her mouth, suckled.

The taste of rust on Rachel’s finger was familiar. Slowly she let that finger slide from her mouth, bumping up against the edges of her teeth, and turned on the showerhead until it didn’t exist at all.

If only getting rid of Sarah Manning was that easy.

If only getting rid of Sarah Manning would fix anything.)

Sarah continues to claw at Rachel’s face, and Rachel supposes that _means_ something. Again and again Rachel is taunted with the return of Sarah’s face, perfect and unmarred, while her own bruises and bleeds and caves in on itself like wreckage. She doesn’t need the reminder – doesn’t want the reminder, doesn’t want to be reminded at all of a concept she refuses to believe in.

Rachel does not like to think that they are the same.

This is because they aren’t. Sarah is all the parts of Rachel that Rachel burned, a great smoking pile of all the worthless parts of her. All the useless pieces. Everything that could be sacrificed – but here is Sarah, not even good enough to be sacrificed, here is Sarah making a mockery of Rachel. Here is Sarah moving in and out of the DYAD like it is nothing, moving in and out of Rachel’s apartment and leaving a body count in her wake.

Rachel refuses to count herself among their number. The purpose of her is not to be a corpse left scattered behind Sarah Manning, like the wig and leather jacket Rachel discarded on the ground. She is not a _prop_ for Sarah Manning’s growth. Just the thought of it – _Sarah Manning’s growth_ – makes her sick. Here is Rachel decaying, the pieces of her cracking and falling off, wigs, the smear of removed lipstick, the visceral wreckage of her eye. Here is Rachel decaying, until there is nothing of Rachel left.

(She had to teach herself the steps, you know, she had to make up all the words on her own. No one taught Rachel Duncan how to waltz, how to apply lipstick with a hand that didn’t shake. No one taught her how good it would feel to have a man be nothing but penis _and_ , and no one taught her why it was that this would feel good.

 _You don’t deserve me either_ , those were the words she should have said. They dangled on her lips like the ashes of a cigarette she’d never smoked – these things are always about ashes, and regrets. Ethan Duncan didn’t deserve her, each inch of her won in the war.)

(But Rachel Duncan built herself; that means when Sarah Manning did her best to tear Rachel down, there was nothing left to come crawling out. The second rule is do not be an animal, but you can only ever take the girl out of the animal. You can cut the girl out of the wolf’s belly, maybe, but you cannot stop yourself from imagining tearing an office to pieces every time you are upset.

She smiles with closed lips. Behind them: her teeth. Behind the lipstick, teeth, the second rule is do not be an animal but when she reached for the broken pieces of herself on the floor of the viewing room she cut herself on the glass. All those broken mirrors, and all that was left was the sort of animal that would cry in front of Sarah Manning, would crush bone marrow beneath her heel just to have the satisfaction of _breaking_ something. Just to have the satisfaction of not being the only broken thing in the room.

Yes, she understands that it was a foolish thing to do. She is not immune to the disease, either – you can try and forget that your blood is the same, but that doesn’t change the reality of it.

She just wanted—

…And therein lies the problem. She is not used to _wanting_.)

There is nothing of Rachel left at all but an empty womb, an empty eye socket, and the empty looks in people’s eyes when she catches them – the space where there was once fear, or loathing, or admiration. Whatever those feelings were. Everything is gone. Without borders to define herself, who is she? _What_ is she? Not Ethan Duncan’s daughter, and never Aldous Leekie’s; no one to Paul, no one of value to Marion. Nothing to Sarah Manning, who never acknowledged the bashed-in lock on Rachel’s door, who could watch Rachel’s life on a screen and – unlike Rachel – turn away. Who could give Rachel her father back before turning around and shooting a pencil into Rachel’s eye.

Sarah Manning has the luxury of entering Rachel’s life and leaving, over and over, taking pieces of Rachel with her and leaving nothing but blood; nothing but a family painted in blood on Rachel’s wall by her sister’s clumsy paws.

This is, of course, the only family Rachel has now.

(When Rachel met Aldous Leekie, she did not think that one day he would be the inadequate replacement for the hole in her chest screaming for a father. She hardly considered. Even later, standing eye level with his ribcage, the palms of her hands sweating where she’d fisted them into the fabric of her funeral dress, she did not really consider.

Later than _that_ she would tell Paul that Aldous had a tendency to grow overly attached. This is true. But never in the ways child-Rachel wanted, learned to outgrow. No, he was fascinated by the history of her, lining up in neat rows in front of her like dominoes farther than her eyes could see. He loved not Rachel but the small pieces that made up Rachel, each strand of hair a beautiful chain of molecules. He loved the nurture of nurturing her, but he did not love the nature that resulted. He did not love Rachel enough to fill that neat Venn diagram hole, dark and hungry as a grave – in time she’d grow to view it as just as dirty.

She will wonder, as she watches the tails of Aldous’ coat go flapping out the door – as he runs, desperately, for some imaginary safety – if he ever could have been a father, had he tried. Goodness knows Ethan had managed, when he crawled his sad way back to her; with his dirty clothes, smelling like birds and feces, he had still held her hand and whispered _I’m sorry_. Aldous’ lab coats were usually immaculate; he smelled of ammonia and emptiness. Surely, surely he could have leaned down and looked Rachel in the eye and said _I’m sorry_. He could have done _something_.

But then Rachel would not be who she was – she would have been changed, by Aldous Leekie’s love of her. Weaker, possibly. She doesn’t know.)

(When Rachel met Marion Bowles, she did not think she would be willing to play at Rachel’s mother. Rachel was older, then, and wobbling on her newfound legs, learning where to put her weight – behind her eyes, and not in her spine. She was just old enough to see Marion as not mentor, not mother, but _threat_. Competition.

Marion, she knows, would have seen her as nothing of the kind. A scared little girl, not yet truly understanding the power she could have if she reached for it.

It would make a better story to say that Marion Bowles helped to shape Rachel – that she taught Rachel the ways in which a skirt and a smirk could topple Troy. Obviously she did not: Rachel Duncan had to learn to make herself, after all, and could not have done so if someone else had held her hand and shown her the way. This is not an easy story. This has never been an easy story.)

(At some point Rachel will learn about Charlotte, close her eyes, imagine tearing away at the seams of the world until it is entirely her vision. Violence is such an addicting outlet for control, in that respect – or so Rachel assumes; she’s never let herself slip, has never _actually_ reached out with her smooth, unused hands and broken.

She will consider it. She will see Marion sitting across from her at a desk, smile like a sharp edge, and wonder if she ever could have been a mother, had she tried. Goodness knows Marion had managed for Charlotte, with her bright smile and even braids. Marion saw Rachel constantly – surely, _surely_ she could have pressed her mouth to Rachel’s ear, whisper something that a mother would say. She could have done _something_

But then Rachel would not be who she was – she would have been changed, by Marion Bowles’ love of her. Weaker, possibly. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t _want_ to know.

Marion did nothing but rip her way into Rachel’s life like a knife through fabric and make Rachel feel inadequacy like a tear in her dress. Did Rachel use that inadequacy to fuel her, the way she would use anger and loss and – before she abandoned it – fear? Certainly.

But she could have used anything they’d given her. She would have become _anything_.

And now she is this. She is only what she has made.)

Someone scrubbed off Helena’s scribblings, off of the glass and the wall and all the places Helena’s fingers had rubbed against on her way out the door. That family is _gone_. That family of Sarah and Helena _and_. Rachel watched the footage – in a different sort of way than she’d watch the footage of her own life, because this was not her life; this was a meteor impacting her life and sending it spiraling off its orderly trajectory.

Sarah and Helena leaned on each other on their way out the door. Sarah cried, shaking and vulnerable and generally distasteful to watch.

Helena did not cry. Helena wrapped herself around Sarah like mistletoe and watched the security camera with eyes made of meteor-rock, dull and dead.

Then she smiled, a twitch like the brainless motions of an insect, and looked back down, pressed her arm harder against Sarah’s shoulders.

Helena is an animal, but she isn’t a stupid one. Aldous was enamored with her, after all, and he was not stupid either; misguided, in many ways, but not stupid. Helena destroyed the results of decades of Rachel’s father’s work easily as a child knocking over a sand castle, but—

(Helena is a child, and Helena is an animal, and Helena deserves nothing, _but—_ )

—she has a family now, apparently. Sisters.

Kira.

Rachel is _certain_ that if she asked Helena – if she was willing to sit across the table from Helena, if she even _could_ sit across the table from Helena – Helena would say that the drawing was meant for Rachel. Rachel _knows_ it was meant for her, Sarah and Helena holding the hands of what may as well be their child. Sarah and Helena, who can have children, and Rachel with _nothing_.

(Rachel has pictured herself destroying her apartment, too. She shatters the mirrors and all the glass surfaces and lunges for someone’s throat, sawing a shard of mirror-glass through the jugular until blood spurts over her. It is hot and wet and _perfect_.

Fine. She has pictured herself slitting Helena’s throat. She has occasionally pictured the same face but different hair, leather-clad arms scrabbling at the steel Rachel pretends is her skin and bone. Sarah Manning deserves a better – worse – deserves a different death than that, though. Helena deserves to be put down like a dog. Abandoned in the middle of a cacophony of shattered glass, lying dead in the apartment – the _life_ – she wrecked like a broken mirror. Just like that.)

Rachel has nothing, now, but: for a brief time Rachel had Kira, as she exited the hospital, heart rattling against her ribs as the little girl drowsed on in her arms. The increase in heart rate was from adrenaline – from passing directly by Siobhan Sadler, who had looked down on her at their previous meeting. She was callous with her threats against Ethan’s life, and looked at Rachel like Rachel was her child.

(Rachel is _not_ her child. Siobhan is not Rachel’s mother; Rachel does not have a mother, has maybe never had a mother.)

The increase in heart rate was from the one spark-bright moment of joy, from plunging a needle into Felix’s neck, from finally getting the chance to lash out against the world. The way Felix’s eyes bulged with shock and horror and fear, when Felix thought Rachel was his sister.

(Rachel is _not_ his sister. Felix is not Rachel’s brother; Rachel does not have a brother – one could argue that Tony Sawicki is Rachel’s brother, but then one would also have to argue that the others are her sisters. This is not true.)

And, beneath the spite and viciousness, Rachel’s heart pounded with the thought of the child being _hers_. Not idle daydreams of brushing hair and baking, or a child’s hand wrapped around her own (unnecessary), but the idea of some flaw in herself being fixed. Her father had looked her in the eye and said that she could not have a child because he had willed it so. What he did not understand is that it was not about his will, not anymore; Rachel Duncan built herself, and she did not need the holes torn in her by someone else claiming to be her creator. _Unnecessary_.

So she fixed it. Everything in order: Sarah Manning deprived of a gift that she never deserved, and Rachel once more proving that she has always been and will always be better than the others. None of them are allowed what she doesn’t have, especially when that is a child.

The third weakness is Kira Manning. Are you surprised?

Ethan Duncan tore open Rachel’s skin-and-bone and Sarah Manning filled that space, but Kira Manning – through no fault of her own, most likely – ripped open all the rest, any undamaged skin. And then all Rachel was was an empty hole of _wanting_ things, of not having things. It wasn’t something she was used to feeling, and because of that it worried at her.

She is used to getting what she wants – whether it is people, promotions, new suits or a perfect cup of tea. She has grown accustomed…which is always dangerous. Luxuries never last, and Rachel’s womb is screaming barren.

(When Aryanna’s tests found her infertile, after Jennifer and Alison’s but before the broken mess of Beth on her bathroom floor, Rachel saw red. For months there was a different secretary, manager, or other thinly-disguised words for “temporary monitor” in her bed every night. She didn’t _want_ a child, but the fact that she _couldn’t_ was a blaring alarm bell in the back of her mind. She wasn’t used to it, being told she _couldn’t_ do anything.

But the tests rolled in, like birds shaking out their fluttering paper wings and cooing neat soothing statistics. They were _all_ barren, and Rachel sat at her desk and looked at the fan of tests unseeingly. She was going through the puzzle, again, of holding a broken and unbroken office in her mind simultaneously. In front of her eyes her desk blurred, shattered, reformed in an unceasing cycle. It too was broken, but the difference was that it could be repaired.

Her justification was this: if _all_ of them were barren, the playing field was even. It was the same playing field it had always been, and it was still in Rachel’s favor. All this did was make all of them worse, but evenly. Rachel was still better. Rachel was still better, self-aware and in control of every inch of her body.

Her hands had not started shaking. Yet.)

And already she was caught in the trap of thinking these things could be _fixed_ ; with Ethan alive it could all be alright, with Sarah brought into the DYAD it could all be alright. It was such a little step from there, to think: _if Kira was my daughter, and not Sarah’s, it could all be alright_. None of the others deserved a child, after all – surely some balance must have been thrown off. Surely something must have gone wrong, some great cosmic joke. It shouldn’t have been Rachel’s job to put the universe back into balance, but she was used to taking on tasks that were beneath her – monitoring the other clones, specifically, a task nearly anyone could have done. Possibly Aldous was enamored with the idea of her looking in on her other lives; in his head, Rachel is the little match girl of the story, pressing her hand and face against the window of a life she could never have.

Still ridiculous. As if she’d want Cosima’s lightless lab, or Alison’s cheap plastic family with a schedule booked to the top with inanities. As if she’d want _any_ of their families – as if she’d wanted a family in the first place, smeared and messy as blood on a wall.

She _learned_ how to want, a lesson she’d never needed or asked for. She learned when suddenly there was no even playing field anymore – when Sarah snuck in through Beth’s life and then ran her grubby fingers all over Rachel’s, like Helena’s fingers on the wall of Rachel’s apartment. Dripping with the blood of people Rachel almost cared about, killing everyone Rachel could have cared about—

But this is about Sarah’s daughter, not Sarah herself. The weakness of Sarah Manning is.

Everything comes back to Sarah – Rachel wanted to be whole, but everyone else only ever wanted Sarah. _Kira_ wanted Sarah, for some reason, although from the records Rachel’s received Sarah wasn’t nearly good enough for her own daughter; for what Aldous would have considered a breathtaking miracle of flesh and bone, Sarah Manning may as well have spit on her daughter.

(Aldous is not her father, but he lingers. As she told Marion: _he had a way_. Sometimes Rachel could feel his excitement reaching for her, like distant sonar pings. For a while it was merely discomforting, different from what she was used to; once she had learned how to detach herself from situations, emotions, it just became vaguely sad. Still: she envied his purpose, slightly. Rachel does things because the DYAD wants them; below this, nothing. Aldous did ( _did_ ) things because he imagined his name in some far-off textbook, the firm solidity of living through the page.

Now he is nothing. Now he is only a parenthetical to Rachel’s thoughts, barely worthy of mention.

Considering she sent him off to die, it’s interesting that she is the only one keeping him alive. The only one who cares. His name will probably never be on anything – not even a tombstone – and he will die just as forgotten as the rest of them.

Oh well.)

Rachel honestly cannot fathom what Kira Manning sees in her mother, what sent her fleeing from the nest Rachel had built, holding the bloodied hand of her mother and not looking back. In theory, Rachel understands: it’s sentimentality, the same thing that made her wail in her DYAD-appointed bedroom years and years ago.

But she had learned to abandon it. She wasn’t lying, when she sat on the edge of the bed, when she looked at the child she had brought into (the world) her world: Kira could have grown to be like Rachel, something adjacent to happy.

She could have grown to be like Rachel.

Fine. She’s thought about Aldous’ desires, from time to time, measured them against her own heart like the old stories of feathers and scales. The idea appeals: creating yourself again, and living – if not forever – after your time.

Rachel Duncan built herself. She could build someone else, too. She knew the steps, by now, and oh what greater victory than taking what Sarah had made and remaking it into something better? To be a mother, no, but the idea is less motherhood and more godhood. She sees her father’s footsteps, presses her own feet over them until they are erased and there is only the mark of that dagger-sharp heel.

To redeem herself? Maybe. Certainly she could redeem Kira, who is likely doomed to follow in her mother’s footsteps just as Rachel could have followed in her father’s. Sometimes it is difficult to cut that umbilical cord, separate yourself from the people who created you. Even if you built yourself, it is just a suit of armor for the same child. The same animal.

She would have liked to tell Kira that, maybe. On the other hand, she would have liked to keep the door of that room locked until Kira stopped crying – just as Rachel did. _Just_ as Rachel did.

(She learned. That is the story, the one that no one particularly wants to tell: the slow and torturous process of learning to remake yourself. It’s not an easy story, lying in your bedroom in the dark and mouthing _I don’t remember at all_ over and over, making sure to not say it out loud so the microphones don’t pick it up. The parents killing the child is tragic, horrifying; the child killing the parents – and not only that, but the _memory_ – is merely sad.

Who likes a sad story, anyways.

Beyond that: who likes a story that makes them uncomfortable? Who likes meeting Rachel Duncan’s eyes and knowing that it is impossible to have power over her – that she does not care about you, maybe _cannot_ care about you? It’s comforting to say: she only wanted to be a daughter, a sister, a mother. She only wanted to be loved.

This is understandable. This makes sense. This makes it _easier for you_ , and that cannot be allowed.)

But Rachel was reborn from one fire, and could not quite manage it a second time. One-trick firebird. Instead she lay on the floor, and bled, and her father’s corpse began the slow inexorable process of decay, and Sarah Manning ran, and Kira Manning held her mother’s hand and did not look back.

Ethan is gone. He left Rachel with a chest full of open boxes, everything she’d packed away coming back to life with a vengeance. He left Rachel with the salt of tears drying on her face and the acrid taste of tea on her tongue.

Sarah is gone. She left Rachel with nothing, no purpose, no prize, no victory – no identity, except _lesser than_. She left Rachel with blood trickling down her cheek, the sound of her own screams and sobs and weakness ringing in her ears.

Kira is gone. She left Rachel with a hole where something could have been; like her mother, too, she left Rachel with nothing. She left Rachel with _nothing_ , like she was never there at all.

All Rachel has left is the holes they have torn in her, the nothing-space where love and hurt and hate had been. Tears she no longer knows how to manage and an empty pink room that will have to be redecorated; the space at her shoulder where a monitor should be, and a fine and constant trembling in her hands.

Beneath all that, behind her lips, all Rachel has is the taste of ash. The world is gone. Rachel has to go through it all again: standing, alone, in the wreckage of a fire.

**Author's Note:**

> Raise up your walls, tighten your blindfold  
> Paces at dawn, hide in a foxhole  
> You'll fall like a guillotine
> 
> [...]
> 
> Envy and I, darkness and light  
> Gods can have it all, so why can't I?  
> \--"Guillotine," YADi
> 
> So I used “Guillotine” for this because it’s one of my favorite “Rachel Duncan kicks ass and burns down the world” songs, but this was mostly inspired by “[Hope in the Air](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKrYOUhOeaI)” and “[Tessellate](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg6BwvDcANg).” I like the first because I think it clearly splits into Ethan/Sarah/Kira and that is neat. So give those a listen if you want more of the mood of the piece, I suppose.
> 
> Did you enjoy? Please leave kudos and comments! And if you want to talk about Rachel Duncan, come at me whenever, I am always eager to talk/rant about her.


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